UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Predicting Butterfly Species Presence from Satellite Imagery Using Soft Contrastive Regularisation

Van Der Plas, TL; Law, S; Pocock, MJO; (2025) Predicting Butterfly Species Presence from Satellite Imagery Using Soft Contrastive Regularisation. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops. (pp. pp. 2165-2174). IEEE: Nashville, TN, USA. Green open access

[thumbnail of 2505.09306v1.pdf]
Preview
Text
2505.09306v1.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (7MB) | Preview

Abstract

The growing demand for scalable biodiversity monitoring methods has fuelled interest in remote sensing data, due to its widespread availability and extensive coverage. Traditionally, the application of remote sensing to biodiversity research has focused on mapping and monitoring habitats, but with increasing availability of large-scale citizen-science wildlife observation data, recent methods have started to explore predicting multi-species presence directly from satellite images. This paper presents a new data set for predicting butterfly species presence from satellite data in the United Kingdom. We experimentally optimise a Resnet-based model to predict multi-species presence from 4-band satellite images, and find that this model especially outperforms the mean rate baseline for locations with high species biodiversity. To improve performance, we develop a soft, supervised contrastive regularisation loss that is tailored to probabilistic labels (such as species-presence data), and demonstrate that this improves prediction accuracy. In summary, our new data set and contrastive regularisation method contribute to the open challenge of accurately predicting species biodiversity from remote sensing data, which is key for efficient biodiversity monitoring.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Predicting Butterfly Species Presence from Satellite Imagery Using Soft Contrastive Regularisation
Event: 2025 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW)
Dates: 11 Jun 2025 - 12 Jun 2025
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1109/CVPRW67362.2025.00204
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1109/cvprw67362.2025.00204
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Accuracy, Satellites, Biological system modeling, Wildlife, Predictive models, Probabilistic logic, Satellite images, Biodiversity, Remote sensing, Monitoring
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215897
Downloads since deposit
8Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item